It is neither darkness or door, not merely, but a starving thing that tears at the soul. A brief bright second of flensing pain hits--like being strained through wires, like being separated from identity-personality-mortal care--and they are out, and the creature leading L is a girl once more. Her parchment-pale skin glows in the utter blackness around them; it illuminates the ground beneath her delicate talons in flashes of carapace and jointed leg and mandible with each careful step.
She is light enough (Omen-light) to glide across the surface of the packed swarm. Heavier steps might sink a crunching quarter-inch into the writhing substrate. Damage provokes them into a frenzy--not at the intruder but each other--an orgiastic burst of cannibalism that sheds its own sickly red glow wherever L treads.
The air is thick with the scream of cicadas and the buzz of locusts, rising high over the Throne-song that beats strongest in bone and muscle. Iskierka follows the thread of its pull, arrow-straight through the dark, and does not turn her head to look at the shapes illumined by her passing. Heaping figures rise and subside, half-glimpsed: A soldier of some huge tusked breed bayoneted by a ragged skeleton--delicate feathered elves like-and-not-like Illarion choking beneath a pall of chlorine gas--a human man with copper-red hair and bloodshot eyes torn to pieces, again and again by the ravening dark.
Join them. Kill. Consume. Give in to the song of war; dance to the beat it calls.]
cw: oh, so many insects; insect cannibalism; wartime violence
It is neither darkness or door, not merely, but a starving thing that tears at the soul. A brief bright second of flensing pain hits--like being strained through wires, like being separated from identity-personality-mortal care--and they are out, and the creature leading L is a girl once more. Her parchment-pale skin glows in the utter blackness around them; it illuminates the ground beneath her delicate talons in flashes of carapace and jointed leg and mandible with each careful step.
She is light enough (Omen-light) to glide across the surface of the packed swarm. Heavier steps might sink a crunching quarter-inch into the writhing substrate. Damage provokes them into a frenzy--not at the intruder but each other--an orgiastic burst of cannibalism that sheds its own sickly red glow wherever L treads.
The air is thick with the scream of cicadas and the buzz of locusts, rising high over the Throne-song that beats strongest in bone and muscle. Iskierka follows the thread of its pull, arrow-straight through the dark, and does not turn her head to look at the shapes illumined by her passing. Heaping figures rise and subside, half-glimpsed: A soldier of some huge tusked breed bayoneted by a ragged skeleton--delicate feathered elves like-and-not-like Illarion choking beneath a pall of chlorine gas--a human man with copper-red hair and bloodshot eyes torn to pieces, again and again by the ravening dark.
Join them. Kill. Consume. Give in to the song of war; dance to the beat it calls.]